Meet the Author: “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family”

Meet the Author: “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family”
Annette Gordon-Reed TNL/file
Meet the Author: “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family”
Annette Gordon-Reed TNL/file

Meet the Author: “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family”

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This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings’s siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson’s wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family’s compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City.

Recorded Thursday, October 02, 2008 at The Newberry Library.